Please Introduce Yourself

Who I am? For me it’s always difficult to talk about myself when someone asked me to do a little introduction. My name is Eduardo Martinez, I am 37 years old, I am a mechanical engineer graduated from the Universidad de Oriente, Venezuela.! I was born in Caracas on August 30, 1980, I was an introverted child who always didn’t fit in. At the age of 16 I started to practice kung fu at the TAK Institute of Wu Shu. The challenge that represented training every day filled me with energy. I remember that the first day I went to train I was so tired that my dad found me lying in the sidewalk in front of the school.

Gimnasio TAK

At age 17, my family and I moved to a smaller city called Puerto la Cruz, where I started at the university graduating in 2004. In 2006, I started working in the refinery industry and due to lack of time I stop training, which I regret till this day. In 2008, playing basketball with some friends I had a partial tear of the Achilles tendon, so the doctor recommended that I shouldn’t practice martial arts anymore, ending "the Era of Kung Fu". At that time, I was 28 and the fact that they told me that I could not practice kung fu was like a flame went out.

One day, the physiotherapist who helped me with my injury, told me to buy a bicycle, I never had a bicycle before so I thought “what the heck?”, I went to a nearby store and I bought a Mérida Matts 80 and Once a star riding a new world opened, the spark and joy that I felt when I started practicing martial arts was there again initiating “the Bike Era”. I was so happy again discovering new trails and make friends along the way…

2010 was a sad year for our family , my girlfriend and I were planning to get married and two months before our wedding we learned that my mother had lung cancer.

My mother was my best friend and my greatest inspiration, in her worst moments she was always strong and despite receiving this sad news, she gave us strength and encouragement to get married. My mom battled for 2 years against her illness but on 06/02/2012 she left us, day that will always be marked on my calendar as the blackest day of my life. The death of my mother has been and will be very difficult to overcome, the pain does not go away and you only get used to having it always with you.

Like all marriages, our life continued with ups and downs, we traveled and on 09/05/2014, we received our greatest treasure and joy, the little Eduardo Ezequiel.

For the future I do not know what awaits us, but now being a little older and wiser, I continue to enjoy life with my wife, my beautiful son and my bike despite of the difficulties, concluding that life is a sweet bitterness, it is not a race of 100mts but a marathon, where the obstacles are there to be conquer and talent without hard work is a tragedy.

keep on riding!!! and thank you for reading!